Author Archives: rubykayi

Online speed dating can find your one and the only one?

Online speed dating, a social event for participant to meet a dozen potential intimate partners by having less than 10 minutes online conversation through web. Despite speed dating face-to-face, online speed dating is beneficial to people who wish to meet a person in other country, who do not want to show up immediately or in public meetings and the people who do not have time and resources to join local events. As reported by New York Times on 29th, Sep, 2013, there were 2 out of every 10 matches successfully became couples.

This kind of social activity reduces the time cost of searching a potential partner in participants’ daily life. Though you meet a lot of people in a day: the bus driver who drives you to work, the waiter who serve you at lunchtime, the one who pass by while you are crossing the road, the one behind you in a queue……Still, we do not know them or even talk to them. Online speed dating provides a chance for the people to meet these strangers or their perfect match.

High frequency of collision is not the only benefit given by online speed dating. Online matching enables participants to meet different “types” of people online which have different job, age, education background or even meeting someone in the other side of the world in order to help them to find their one and the only one as online speed dating is not limited by time and geographical boundaries. There is a successful case that happened between a female in China and a male in Thailand, after constant online conversation for three years, they decided to meet each other face-to-face in China, then they fell in love and finally they wrote their own magical romance, they married.

As participants will have their meeting privately, they are able to communicate effectively while they usually chat in a quite environment. Online speed dating provides a kind of security that is much safer than in bars, clubs and parties that meeting strangers face-to-face.
Regrettably, there are two sides in every question.Last but not least, no extra fee is paid in online dating. Participants can simply use their desktop computer at home, notebook, tablet or even smart phone to attend the meetings by using Skype, Whatsapp and QQ in mainland China. They need not pay for the meal, drinks entertainment expenditure during the meeting.

Regard to limitation of online speed dating, the credibility of profile provided by the participant may be questioned. Some of the online speed dating in similar to MSN, they just know the email and the profile picture of their date, then they start their conversation and have “good impression” without authenticate the facticity of the profile picture or the true identity of the date which is mostly the cause of typical tragedy: When they start meeting someone face-to-face which totally looks different from the profile picture. Due to privacy, participants have their rights to choose whether expose their personal information or not, consequently, participants only put their best foot forward and try to please their dates at any cost in order to leave a lasting, fine impression by providing fake images in online dating, bogus employment status or trying to hide some of their information or even lie. Alas, it is hard to avert providing unfaithful information or concealing their background information, as it is up to the participant to expose how many of oneself.

Online speed dating brings hope of companionship and love to people who are in need, but it still brings problems and limitation. Therefore, it is not a miraculous method to finds intimate partners, people ought to be aware of the traps in speed dating.

Here is s video talking about how online dating being organised and how the company ensure the credibility of information that the participant provided.

How digital access flipped learning and benefit to university students?

As a university student, there are lots of tasks and challenges during learning, in order to improve and develop their skills like communication, collaboration, and leadership skills and their abilities to plan, analyze…More in Authentic Learning. However, digital give support to flipped learning so as to benefit to university students.

“Flipped Learning is a pedagogical approach in which direct instruction moves from the group learning space to the individual learning space, and the resulting group space is transformed into a dynamic, interactive learning environment where the educator guides students as they apply concepts and engage creatively in the subject matter.” (Flipped Learning Network, 2014)

Flipped learning helps solving the difficulties of university students as it is a strategy for educators to help enhancing learning effectiveness among students. There are four pillars in flipped leaning: Flexible environment, Learning culture, Intentional content and Professional educator.

For flexible learning environment, digital provides online learning environment and rich online learning resource to university students. As an example, the Online learning environment (OLE) in Open University in Hong Kong has been provided for both student and teacher sectors so as to benefit to the study of students. Functions in OLE Discussion board, PowerPoint and Read-it-out provide different ways for students to learn content with different demonstrations and establish different learning environment, not just learning in the classroom, also at home with a computer, even on the street with a smart phone.

Regard to learning culture which advocate learner-centered model, digital increase the frequency of participation of students. With advanced technology such as demonstrating videos during class and online learning platforms, more social and academic activities are hold to make students approachable with one another through diversity and feedback as students can explore the topics they have learnt in greater depth, increase learning opportunities by participation, using their knowledge in higher frequency. On top of that, educators can evaluate the manner of students as well as improve their teaching strategy.

Apart from learning culture, digital helps accessing intentional content. As intentional content is to assess the application of Flipped Learning Model continually, teacher can collect real time news and articles from the internet and save as teaching materials by using Wikispaces. It is an online tool that helps a teacher to prepare and save lessons online and act as a backup while there was accident for the hard copy of the teaching materials. Enriched teaching materials are given to students by using online digital tools, for instance the teachers can integrate Power Point presentations, videos, flash cards, music, and even games to your lessons, or add different visual effects to them, so as to boost their interest towards learning and leave a long-lasting impression of what they have learnt in the lecture.

It is hard to take care of every student for a professional educator, especially there are more than hundreds students in every class in the university. Thus, digital tools such as installing Panopto, which is widely used in class capturing tools. By recording a class lecture, lecturer, PowerPoint presentations and your screens, then, uploaded to Canvas, students are able to search any lecture by using related keywords to review the lectures anytime they want. In this case, students are able to learn at their own pace, more concentrate and deeper understanding on the lecture as they can pause and replay the video in many times without limit, even, send electronic questions to your teachers and receive a quick response online.Here is an introduction of Panopto:

Flipped learning is totally different with the one-way traditional teaching. With the support of digital services and tools it enhances the interest of learning among students, increase the participation of students and enrich the input of materials towards students.